Why OpenAI's Announcement Was A Bigger Deal Than People Think

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, a deep dive on OpenAI Spring Update. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, come check out our Discord. You can find the link in the show notes.

0:24Quick note before we dive into the episode, I don't want to break up this stream of consciousness with any ads. I do want to shout out that at Superintelligent, you better believe that we are going to start digging into these new OpenAI updates right about now. I, for one, am particularly excited to try out these new image generation capabilities that have what appears like it could be incredible ability to include specific text, as well as native consistent character generation. And so as always, if you haven't checked out Superintelligent yet and you want to get your AI learning on, go to besuper.ai and use code podcast for 50 % off your first month.

0:54Now, let's talk about what the heck OpenAI just announced. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today is one of those days, kind of the opposite of some of the ones we've had recently, where everyone is talking about just one thing. And so instead of doing our whole normal brief then main episode sort of conversation, we are just going to focus on the big thing that everyone is talking about, which is, of course, OpenAI Spring Update. Now, this is the event that has been rumored for a couple of weeks. For a while, there was speculation that we were going to see a search engine, some sort of competition with Google and perplexity.

1:26But towards the end of last week, as the event apparently got delayed a couple of days, it started to come into view that the most likely candidate was some sort of personal assistant update, particularly around voice features. Now, this, I believe, will go down as one of the most divisive, initially, product updates that OpenAI has ever released. So what we're going to do on this show is first we're going to talk about what they actually shared, and then we'll get into the reactions and why I think it's actually more significant, not less significant, than it seems at first. Right away, the first thing you noticed when it kicked off was that Sam Altman was not the want presenting.

1:57I could be totally wrong, but I initially took this as a sign that perhaps it wasn't going to be as big an announcement as we might have thought, sort of with the idea that they were keeping Sam in the background for the big major updates like GPT 4.5 or GPT 5. Now, one of the things that you'll hear a lot throughout this assessment of what happened is that I think that people's expectations or hopes really more than expectations of GPT 4.5 or GPT 5 colored the way that they received what was actually shared. This is, of course, in spite of the fact that OpenAI did make it clear in advance that we were not getting GPT 4.5 or GPT 5.

2:30Quickly, CTO Mira Morati honed in on three big pieces of the announcement. First, there was a ChatGPT desktop app. Second, there was an updated ChatGPT UI. And three, and obviously the most important, there was a new flagship model called GPT 4.0. Basically, this was described as GPT 4 level intelligence, but faster and with better ways to interact. On OpenAI's website, they call it their new flagship model that can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time. The O they write stands for OMNI, and is a quote, step towards much more natural human-computer interaction. It accepts any input as combination of text, audio, and image, and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs.

3:08Plus, they say it's really fast. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time in a conversation. Before they got into the demos, the next part of announcement had to do with accessibility. Specifically, they said with the efficiencies of GPT-4 Omni, we can bring this to everyone. What that meant was that free users now have access to a GPT-4 level model, custom GPTs, the GPT store, basically everything that you were paying for before. Paying users didn't have access to any differentiated technology anymore.

3:39Instead, they had five times the capacity limits. They also would be first in line for new features, as we saw later in the day, as GPT-4 started immediately rolling out. And as we'll discuss in a little bit, the improvement in what's available at the free base level is hugely massive. And the only reason I think that it wasn't talked about as such is that the vast majority of people who are spending their time watching an OpenAI product video are probably already springing for the GPT Plus account. In other words, the free access part doesn't benefit them, so it's easier for them to overlook the significance in aggregate.

4:10We'll come back to that though in a few minutes. GPT-4.0 was also going to impact the API. Specifically, it was going to make it 50 % cheaper, which is obviously a significant change. From there, we got into the live demos of the real-time conversational capacity of the ChatGPT app. When Mira Mirati asked what's different from the existing voice mode that we have, the presenters answered that you can butt in whatever without throwing it off, that it has real-time responsiveness, that the model picks up on emotion, and that it can generate voice in a wide variety of styles. This emotional awareness is pretty significant.

4:43One of the demos that they did was telling a bedtime story, and the two presenters kept asking it to change or modulate its speech based on some new criteria. So first they wanted it to be more dramatic, then even more dramatic, then most dramatic of all, which it did each time very successfully. And then they switched it to dramatic but in a robot voice, and then they had it sing the end of the story. I will note here that even for people who weren't that impressed with anything else, many had the same thought that cassette AI had when they said, gotta give GPT-40 props, that's the most natural sounding AI voice I've ever heard.

5:14Next up they showed off the new vision capabilities. First, they did a linear equation where they asked ChatGPT to help walk them through how to solve it. So instead of just pointing the screen at an equation on a piece of paper and asking it to solve it, the presenters were really using it as a tutor more than anything else. And in that way, I think it reflected what they were really showing off, which is these features as not somehow standalone, but as part of a complete assistant experience. And speaking of that assistant capability, they also did a demo where they brought up the ChatGPT desktop app, specifically the conversational version of it, and were able to ask it about the code that they were writing in a different application, simply by copying it into the ChatGPT window.

5:51They also showed off ChatGPT describing what it saw on screen after the code was run. The two other demos they did, theoretically from audience input, were real-time translation, where one of the presenters spoke in English, and then Miro responded in Italian, with ChatGPT operating as the translator in real time. And then finally, they asked ChatGPT to recognize the emotions looking at someone's face. And then that was it. It was a tight half an hour. There was no big one more thing, Steve Jobs type of moment. And like I said, there were a lot of kind of underwhelmed responses. Abacus AI CEO Bindu Reddy writes, Is this me or was that it?

6:24What, even? That was the single most underwhelming thing I've seen this year. I'm not sure what's cool about this. That Google duplex demo from 2019 was way better. The only highlight, if any, was the tone modulation, which wasn't even that spectacular. Theo Jaffe writes, Maybe I'll be crucified for this, but I actually wasn't blown away by this demo like I was for the releases of ChatGPT and GPT-4. This seems more like a product update than a foundational new capability breakthrough. On the flip side, you add folks like Pete from The Neuron who wrote, GPT-4-0 is magical, absolutely magical. Rory wrote, blown away that more people aren't blown away.

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9:12So don't miss out. Follow Managing the Future of Work on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. But what about the team at OpenAI? What story were they trying to tell? Well, Sam Altman wrote it up explicitly on his blog. He said that he wanted to highlight two parts of the announcement. First, he said, a key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free or at a great price. I'm very proud that we've made the best model in the world available for free in ChatGPT without ads or anything like that. Our initial conception, he continues, when we started OpenAI was that we'd create AI and use it to create all sorts of benefits for the world.

9:46Instead, it now looks like we'll create AI and then other people will use it to create all sorts of amazing things that we all benefit from. We are a business and we'll find plenty of things to charge for and that will help us provide free, outstanding AI service to hopefully billions of people. Second, Sam writes, the new voice and video mode is the best computer interface I've ever used. It feels like AI from the movies, and it's still a bit surprising to me that it's real. Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change. The original ChatGPT showed a hint of what was possible with language interfaces.

10:13This new thing feels viscerally different. It is fast, smart, fun, natural, and helpful. Talking to a computer has never felt really natural for me. Now it does. As we add optional personalization, access to your information, the ability to take actions on your behalf, and more, I can really see an exciting future where we are able to use computers to do much more than ever before. And so I think Sam is getting here at two of the three biggest parts of the announcement, the transformation that this represents when you make it free, and OpenAI's bet on a new mode of human-computer interaction. I'm going to talk about each of those in some more detail, but the third that I want to point out is truly native multimodality of this.

10:47This was an announcement that was not for a technical audience. At least it didn't seem to be to me. All of it was incredibly simple language, and they didn't even show off some of the capabilities. In fact, because they didn't explain it, some people questioned what was going on underneath the hood. Andrew Gao writes, For my technical audience, thoughts on what's behind GPT-40? Is it really multimodal and not converting things to text? I.e., you can replicate the demo by using Whisper to convert speech to text, use regular GPT-4, and then convert the response to speech using 11 labs. It would be entirely different if OpenAI was actually going from audio waves to audio waves end-to-end without other models in between.

11:21Definitely possible and would explain the ability to understand and hear breathing in the demo, but this is also doable without that necessarily. Well, Andre Karpathy, previously of the founding team of OpenAI, explained it this way. He said, they are releasing a combined text audio vision model that processes all three modalities in one single neural network, which can then do real-time voice translation as a special case afterthought if you ask it to. In other words, yes, this is true native multimodality. It is not taking language tokens and then converting them. Will DePoo, who works on video generation at OpenAI, says, I think people are misunderstanding GPT-4-0.

11:53It isn't a text model with a voice or image attachment. It's a natively multimodal token in, multimodal token out model. You want it to talk fast? Just prompt it to. Need to translate into whale noises? Just use few-shot examples. An example that he showed was character-consistent image generation just by conditioning it on previous images. He then showed an example, and if any of you have spent any time trying to get consistent characters with workarounds like style reference on mid-journey or creating a custom GPT as I've done, or using a third-party application like Scenario.gg, the fact that it might just natively have these capabilities is pretty significant.

12:25So to me, the three biggest parts of this announcement were, one, the fact that this best-in-class model was free for everyone, two, the fact that it was truly natively multimodal, and three, the fact that OpenAI was clearly making such a huge bet on this new type of human-computer interaction as the future of how we interact with AI. But what about when people started to get their hands on it? How are the reactions then? Well, Sully Omar from Cognosis writes, GPT-4.0 is way, way faster than GPT-4. It feels like an entirely different model. Insanely fast. Andrew Gao again writes, to everyone disappointed by OpenAI today, don't be.

12:59The live stream was for general consumer audience. The cool stuff is hidden on their site. Some of the examples he gives are text-to-3D, hugely advanced text and AI-generated images. Andrew points out they're so confident in their text image abilities that they can create fonts with GPT-4.0, and a bunch of other huge things as well. Sully again writes, Okay, I get where ChatGPT is going. Ultimate workflow equals screen share with ChatGPT. ChatGPT operates the computer for you. You can interject chat all through voice. It's like having someone there directly working with you. In fact, right now, as we're recording this, streaming live on X is someone coding in cursor with GPT-4-0, basically as a live coding companion.

13:36Others pointed out that the timing of this was no accident. Robert Scoble writes, What was just announced by OpenAI was designed to blunt attacks by Apple and Google as both companies are about to change their voice assistants to LLM-based systems that will fix most of the things we hate about both. Apple has lots of advantages that it can brag about, like you'll be able to change the brightness on your phone by talking to Siri, or be integrated into Apple's ecosystem, i.e. can you put something on my Reminders app? Others pointed out that the ChatCBT demo today was basically the demo that everyone freaked out about from Gemini Ultra back in December that then everyone found out was edited to death and not actually representative of its true capabilities.

14:11Even more than that, though, Google I.O. is happening tomorrow. And Logan Kilpatrick, who notably used to work at Open AI, shared a video of what is presumably a Gemini assistant looking at the I.O. stage and explaining it to the person holding the phone. So it seems highly likely that tomorrow we're going to be having a very similar conversation comparing to whatever they announce at Google I.O. to what we got from Open AI today. Oh, and as one fun little aside, they did confirm that the I'm also a good GPT-2 chatbot that everyone has been freaking out about on LIMSYS is indeed a version of GPT-4-0 that they've been testing.

14:43When it comes to real-world response, certainly the real-time translation demo seems to have had an impact. One little coder pointed out a 5 % drop in Duolingo's price in the wake of the demo. Siki Chen summed up where I think a lot of people will end up in the long run when he wrote, this will prove to be in retrospect by far the most underrated OpenAI event ever. He even went further and said, TLDR, GPT-4-0 is a significantly larger improvement over GPT-4 than 3.5 was over 3. GPT-4-0 equals GPT-4.75. I think the point here, one that will ultimately be proven out or not by our interactions with it, is that this native multi-modality, plus the ability to input on the basis of vision and video, transforms the use cases of ChatGPT in a huge way that we're probably underestimating initially.

15:29Another part of this, though, was summed up by Aaron Levy from Box. He wrote, the productivity unlocked for humanity is pretty insane when AI can bring this level of intelligence to anyone. Like I said, I think the reason that we're not talking more about just how significant the free shift is, is that most of us who are doing the talking right now have been paying for ChatGPT since the moment we could. Giving billions of people access to that though, for free, is just likely to have an enormous, enormous impact on work, society, and everything in between. Ultimately, we'll see. I think it is in no way guaranteed that the way that people will want to interact with these technologies is through these sort of chat modalities or interactions with video, the real world will show us that one way or another.

16:09Regardless of what plays out, though, it's pretty clear that OpenAI believes that this is truly the future of interaction with AI. I think just because Sam Altman wasn't doing the presentation, just because they might have rushed this a little to get in ahead of Google I.O., and just because they didn't announce formally 4.5 or GPT-5, it would be a mistake to underestimate how significant this update is in the minds of OpenAI themselves. However, there is going to be a lot more to discuss with this, especially with Google I.O. coming tomorrow. So that is going to do it for this edition of the AI Daily Brief.

16:39Until next time, peace.